Third

Let’s see. January 26, 2012 was a Thursday. So I worked… and if I’m not mistaken, that was the day three of my jobs in progress came to a screeching halt because of an issue with state permitting. That was the day I called an emergency contractor meeting for this Monday. That was also the day I fired one of my contractors, started seriously training my new guy, and started trying to get my schedule fixed now that I actually have a full staff again. I think that was also the day that Sharkman and Rhett were working on his Citizenship badge, I was overseeing the installation of carpet in the house I grew up in (now our rent house), and deciding whether or not I was going to have a fight with my sister.

So of course I missed it and am posting late. *sigh*

TSOC is three years old. It’s amazing.

It’s also kind of sad and pathetic. There are so many cobwebs and so much dust piled up in my little corner of the internet from this past year of mostly-absence. I miss writing. I miss being a writer. But life and survival and crazy seem to have taken over all my spare time. I don’t think that’s going to improve a whole lot in the immediate future, either.

See, I’m still working full time. Rhett and I are still working on Baby #2. Sharkman’s still in athletics and Cub Scouts. And now I’m studying for the GMAT so that I can apply to schools for my MBA this fall.

January, 2009 – WaterBaby’s cancer diagnosis. Hitting pause on our breakup. Struggling to reconcile femme with lesbian with my attraction to masculine-oriented/identified other. Brought to you, live, from northern New Mexico. Where I was freezing to death.

January, 2010 – WaterBaby’s remission (informal, undiagnosed) and the aftermath of her choice to turn away from medical intervention and feedback. The unpause and finalization of our breakup. Being femme in a small semi-Southern town. Reconciling work with life. Rhett’s reappearance (informal, unannounced). Brought to you, live, from the panhandle of Florida. Where I was freezing to death.

January, 2011 – Dealing with the unceremonious return to my home state, the crumbling of my career, the revival of my career, and learning to celebrate my birthday again. My marriage and its effect on my work/life balance. The most beautiful birthday cake ever. Brought to you, live, from the windy wilds of eastern New Mexico. Where I was freezing to death and Rhett was learning to live with wind chill he hadn’t seen since Alaska.

I didn’t do justice to 2011, and I didn’t do justice to the first month of 2012. In these past months, I’ve been struggling with a nasty funk of depression, interspersed with wild and wooly highs verging on mania that made me irritable, irritating, and downright unpleasant to deal with. I’ve started coming to terms with the cycling of my moods and the fact that the cycling may actually be clinically diagnosable. I’ve started a supplement that seems to be helping with that cycling, and as a result am feeling more human right now than I have since approximately September.

I bought a GMAT study guide and picked a testing date. I settled on the business schools I want to apply to, and a couple of backups.

We put Sharkman in counseling and had our suspicions confirmed; he’s a perfectly normal nine year old boy with a ridiculously advanced vocabulary and emotional intellect.

I got a new job, got promoted, had 100% turnover in my department, and survived the fourth quarter of one hell of an inherited mess. That I’m almost done cleaning up.

I’ve dealt with seventeen cycles of Janus-crazy.

Hell, it seems like I’ve lived an entire lifetime in the last year, much less the last three.

All I know is that it isn’t over, and I’m not done with blogging. I’m moving slow, and I’m not good about getting back here on a regular basis, and in a lot of ways, I’ve stalled out on my personal/emotional development in the midst of the ups and downs and crazy. But TSOC is still mine, and it’s still important to me. I never forget that I have a blog. I never stop making mental notes of things that would make a good story. I never wish I hadn’t started, or feel the need to close it down.

If you’re reading, thanks. Thanks for showing up today, for showing up yesterday, for coming back tomorrow. Thanks for emailing me, texting me, getting to know me, tweeting me, and making room in your head for my thoughts.